Enterprises or other organizations rely on data centers to fulfill their information technology (IT) needs for executing application programs that enable organizational operations. A data center is typically a centrally-controlled computing system with powerful compute, network, and storage resources that are scalable (added or removed) as organizational operations change. Data centers are very often implemented on one or more cloud platforms.
However, as the need for IT capabilities moves away from the use of centrally-controlled data centers and more towards so-called “edge computing systems” (e.g., computing resources that are highly distributed and not part of a centrally-controlled data center or cloud platform), emerging application programs may still need to leverage data-center-like capabilities. Depending on the type of program, applications may also need edge computing resources for relatively long execution time periods (e.g., multiple hours). Existing edge computing architectures are not configured to address these challenges.